TO 1:33 P.M. We use kinder words about ourselves than others use; we do not see or hear about ourselves what others see. Florence Adams could have read the police description of herself and, with the name omitted, found that it stirred no faintest recollection of anyone she had ever seen. Her skin was rather dark, and she thought of it as “olive”; her hair was black, surely, but the word “black” alone did not describe it—it would have been, had been, a word which, used alone, was clearly inadequate for the purpose. She had read, in a magazine story, of a heroine whose hair was “lustrous black” and, although Florence Adams could not readily have told how a lustrous thing would look, she thought afterward of her own hair as like the heroine’s in the book. Magazines were books to Florence Adams, as they were, at the other extreme, to magazine editors. Florence Adams was a slight, not tall, girl—perhaps petite was the word—with lustrous black hair and an olive complexion.
